Longstanding bug with Various Artists compilations

Plex Media Server Metadata & Adding Files
1

Server Version#: 1.32.4.7195
Player Version#: n/a
I have had a longstanding bug with Various Artists albums randomly having the Album Artist applied. Plex seems to randomly assign a particular artist (lately I’ve had Paul Kelly commonly for example and there have been two or three other artists over the years that it seems to latch onto) despite no works by that artist being on the album.
I have followed the guidance here - the album artist on all tracks is Various Artists, title the same and they are placed in a “Various Artists” folder in the main Music folder. This has been happening for at least a couple of years but I’ve got really fed up with it so did some testing. I did the Plex shuffle and put a whole load of VA compilations into the Various Artists subfolder. They all appeared. Most for some reason decided to put the artist as Diverse artiesten rather than Various Artists which is one annoyance, but the main one is that random albums have “Paul Kelly” as the artist. Paul Kelly is not an artist on any track on the affected albums.

albums
albums827×408 365 KB

Metadata for all the files on that Album are correct:
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Interestingly the albums that mapped as Diverse artiesten have “Various” rather than “Various Artists” as the album artists.
My agent settings for Albums and last.fm have “Local Media Assets” at the top.
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Does anyone have any clues why the mismatching happens? And also it would be cool not to have them labelled as Diverse Artisien (something that doesn’t happen all the time).

2

if you are positive all your tags are correct then edit the library and make sure this is enabled

Plex
Plex717×517 37.4 KB

Diverse Artiesten

Is the library set to Nederlands (Dutch)?

3

Yes I’ve checked all the tags for each track on the album.

The library is set to English
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Prefer local metadata is set
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It is very erratic, the Diverse artiesten only happens occasionally. Just added another album tagged in the same way and it imported OK. Would love to understand why. Interestingly I fixed hundreds of albums at the end of last week (manually changing the artist in the web interface on the album) then when I looked a few days later they had reverted again.

4

I agree there may be some kind of issue with Various Artists but I’ve been unable to figure out repro steps. I suspect it may be sensitive to issues outside the Various Artists files.

I had big problems when I first started using Plex, but once I got my whole library 100% ship-shape, I haven’t had the problem since, despite adding many new files. Following all the rules, all the time seems like the only fix.

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DO you have the same issue with `prefer local metadata" disabled?

6

Hi

I tried that last week but a whole lot of albums that I’ve fixed a couple of times have done it again since, this time choosing another random artist as the album artist!

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